Project Juno was a privately funded campaign which selected

Helen Sharman Helen Patricia Sharman, CMG, OBE, HonFRSC (born 30 May 1963) is a British chemist and cosmonaut who became the first British person, first Western European woman and first privately funded woman in space, as well as the first woman to visit ...

to be the first

Briton British people or Britons, also known colloquially as Brits, are the citizens of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the British Overseas Territories, and the Crown dependencies.: British nationality law governs mod ...

in space. As the United Kingdom did not, at that time, have a human spaceflight programme (until the UK joined the human spaceflight elements of

ESA , owners = , headquarters = Paris, Île-de-France, France , coordinates = , spaceport = Guiana Space Centre , seal = File:ESA emblem seal.png , seal_size = 130px , image = Views in the Main Control Room (120 ...

's exploration programme in December 2012, which led to

Tim Peake Major Timothy Nigel Peake (born 7 April 1972) is a British Army Air Corps officer, European Space Agency astronaut and a former International Space Station (ISS) crew member. He is the first British ESA astronaut, the second astronaut to b ...

mission in 2015), a private consortium was formed to raise money to pay the

Soviet Union The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, ...

for a seat on a

Soyuz Soyuz is a transliteration of the Cyrillic text Союз ( Russian and Ukrainian, 'Union'). It can refer to any union, such as a trade union (''profsoyuz'') or the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (Сою́з Сове́тских Социалис ...

mission to the

Mir ''Mir'' (russian: Мир, ; ) was a space station that operated in low Earth orbit from 1986 to 2001, operated by the Soviet Union and later by Russia. ''Mir'' was the first modular space station and was assembled in orbit from 1986 to&n ...

space station. The Soviet Union had recently flown

Toyohiro Akiyama is a retired Japanese TV journalist and professor at Kyoto University of Art and Design. In December 1990, he spent seven days aboard the Mir space station. He became the first person of Japanese nationality to fly in space, and his space mi ...

, a Japanese

journalist A journalist is an individual that collects/gathers information in form of text, audio, or pictures, processes them into a news-worthy form, and disseminates it to the public. The act or process mainly done by the journalist is called journalis ...

, under a similar arrangement.

Selection

A call for applicants was publicized in the UK (one ad read "Astronaut wanted. No experience necessary"), leading to 13,000 applications. Juno selected four candidates to train in the Soviet Union: * Gordon Brooks (

Royal Navy The Royal Navy (RN) is the United Kingdom's naval warfare force. Although warships were used by English and Scottish kings from the early medieval period, the first major maritime engagements were fought in the Hundred Years' War against ...

physician, then 33) * Major Timothy Mace (

Army Air Corps Army Air Corps may refer to the following army aviation corps: * Army Air Corps (United Kingdom), the army aviation element of the British Army * Philippine Army Air Corps (1935–1941) * United States Army Air Corps (1926–1942), or its p ...

, 33) * Clive Smith (

Kingston University , mottoeng = "Through Learning We Progress" , established = – gained University Status – Kingston Technical Institute , type = Public , endowment = £2.3 m (2015) , ...

lecturer, 27) *

(food technologist, 26) Eventually Mace and Sharman were selected to continue full-time training at Star City. After learning Russian and familiarising themselves with the science programme, Smith and Brooks were employed to teach the other two how to perform the experiments and then to conduct them in a life sized mock up of Mir for live media during the mission.

Funding

The cost of the flight was to be funded by various innovative schemes, including sponsoring by private British companies and a lottery system. Corporate sponsors included

British Aerospace British Aerospace plc (BAe) was a British aircraft, munitions and defence-systems manufacturer. Its head office was at Warwick House in the Farnborough Aerospace Centre in Farnborough, Hampshire. Formed in 1977, in 1999 it purchased Marcon ...

Memorex Memorex Corp. began as a computer tape producer and expanded to become both a consumer media supplier and a major IBM plug compatible peripheral supplier. It was broken up and ceased to exist after 1996 other than as a consumer electronics bran ...

, and

Interflora Interflora is a flower delivery network, associated with over 58,000 affiliated flower shops in over 140 countries. It is a subsidiary of Teleflora, a subsidiary of The Wonderful Company. History In 1920 a florist, Joe Dobson, of Leighton's ...

, and television rights were sold to ITV. The flight cost £7 million. Ultimately the Juno consortium failed to raise the entire sum, and the Soviet Union considered cancelling the mission. However Mikhail Gorbachev directed the mission to proceed at Soviet cost. The ambitious microgravity experiments originally planned were dropped when time ran out for sending required equipment on an automated 'Progress' flight. Helen did perform experiments designed by British schools that could be done with existing equipment aboard Mir along with a British microbiology screening investigation taken over by the Russians.

Flight and after

Sharman was launched aboard

Soyuz TM-12 Soyuz TM-12 was the 12th expedition to Mir, and included the first Briton in space,The mission report is available here: http://www.spacefacts.de/mission/english/soyuz-tm12.htm Helen Sharman. Crew Mission highlights The Mir crew welcomed aboa ...

on 18 May 1991, and returned aboard

Soyuz TM-11 Soyuz TM-11 was the eleventh expedition to the Russian Space Station Mir, using a Soyuz-TM crew transport vessel. The mission notably carried a Japanese television reporter from Tokyo Broadcasting System.The mission report is available here: htt ...

on 26 May 1991. Both Sharman and Mace were candidates but not selected in the 1992 and 1998 European Space Agency selection rounds for its astronaut corps. Brooks was also put forward for the European Astronaut Corps in 1982, but dropped out when employed on AI systems elsewhere. Mace did not fly in space, but married the daughter of

cosmonaut An astronaut (from the Ancient Greek (), meaning 'star', and (), meaning 'sailor') is a person trained, equipped, and deployed by a human spaceflight program to serve as a commander or crew member aboard a spacecraft. Although generally r ...

Vitali Zholobov Vitaly Mikhaylovich Zholobov (russian: link=no, Виталий Михайлович Жолобов; born 18 June 1937) is a retired Soviet cosmonaut who flew on Soyuz 21 space flight as the flight engineer. Career Zholobov joined the space prog ...

. He was later the

helicopter A helicopter is a type of rotorcraft in which lift and thrust are supplied by horizontally spinning rotors. This allows the helicopter to take off and land vertically, to hover, and to fly forward, backward and laterally. These attributes ...

pilot for President of South Africa Nelson Mandela. He died in September 2014 from cancer.

References

External links

BBC articleArticle about Gordon Brooks and Juno
{{DEFAULTSORT:, Juno, Project Human spaceflight programs Science and technology in the United Kingdom Russia–United Kingdom relations Soviet Union–United Kingdom relations Soyuz program Space programme of the United Kingdom

Selection

Funding

Flight and after

See also

References

External links